


Spiritwalkers

by Siavahda



Category: Original Work
Genre: Adopted Sibling Relationship, Conflicting Magic Systems, Consensual Possession, Demons, Everyone is Queer, F/F, F/M, Foster Care, Gods, Kidnapping, M/M, Magic, Male-Female Friendship, Matriarchy, Multi, Polyamory, Queer Families, Sex Positive, Spirits, Unicorns, Urban Fantasy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-16
Updated: 2015-12-16
Packaged: 2018-05-07 00:05:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5435804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siavahda/pseuds/Siavahda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone is different. Embracing that difference grants magic; despising it births demons. And then there are those who are the hands of the gods...</p><p>The Spiritwalkers protect the human race from demons of their own making. With them are a world's worth of mages, people who have harnessed their differences and spun them into power. They are spread out all over the globe, in schools, in coffee houses, in hospitals, protecting those the world deems valueless. Sometimes the protected join their ranks. Sometimes they find the magic too.</p><p>When Mercedes and her foster-brother Ethan witness an attack at a club and try to intervene, they discover more than magic. They're Spiritwalkers, chosen by gods of different pantheons to be the guides and protectors of humanity - but before they can learn what that means, other Spiritwalkers start to go missing. The demons are organizing against the Walkers, something no one has ever seen before, and at the center of the army is a dark power no one can name - something rising like a black phoenix out of a forgotten betrayal. Something willing to take the battleground out of the shadows and into the streets. </p><p>Something willing to burn the world down.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spiritwalkers

Nicky casually stepped out of the flow of traffic and dropped to one knee, pretending to retie his shoe laces. Surreptitiously, his green eyes swept over his surroundings, the fall of his hair obscuring his face as his eyes started to glow.

A soft whisper as Leandra’s presence nudged the back of his mind. _*You see anything?*_

 _*Nothing out of the ordinary,*_ he assured her, straightening up. He widened the link, allowing her to see through his eyes. Teenagers pushing adulthood shifted their weight alongside men and women in their twenties, all of them dolled up for the night. Lipstick shone slick and fresh under the streetlights, plastic bracelets and overlarge rings decorated hands like sugar on cake, denim and leather and silk and cotton wove rainbows in the dark, and all of it paled in comparison to the soft flickers of the crowd’s auras. Young and old(er) alike wore their hearts like scarves of the Aurora Borealis, shimmering bioluminescent to his fey-vision. _*Just the usual crowd, queuing up to get hammered on a Saturday night.*_

He let the fey-vision go, glanced at his reflection in a puddle to watch the supernatural light in his eyes fade away, and moved forward to join the line.

Twenty minutes later Leandra murmured _*Good luck,*_ as the doorman waved him into the club; Nicky touched two fingers to his temple in acknowledgement, knowing she could see the gesture.

Inside music roared like an angry dragon, hooking its claws into his pulse and dragging him into its rhythm, and only years of experience kept him from losing himself to it. He grounded, sought the anchor of the ley line under his feet and scouted the dancing, pounding crowd for a powerboost. It would take more than his tattoos and sky-blue hair to work magic in here. Magic depended on breaking from the norm, but in a place like this he _was_ the norm.

He had to change that, and fast.

He called his fey-vision, knowing no one would notice his eyes in the chaos of the neon and strobe lights; pink and yellow and blue and green blinked staccato over the dancers, overlying the softer, gentler lights of their auras. Soon he spotted what he was looking for; a distinctive flare, a fierce, bright gold, joyous and exultant—so much so that for a second he thought one of the other q-mages was here. But no, he realised as he walked closer, he didn’t recognise the young man, although he would have liked to—would have liked a chance to get to know the easy elation that transformed an average face into a stunning one, to learn the glorious unselfconsciousness with which he moved, heedless of his audience. How had no one picked him up for training?

Nicky opened his aura wide, stretching it out to its full span, and saw the young man’s eyes turn to him, widening. Powerful or not, it took training to learn fey-vision, but even untrained norms could sense strong auras. They read them as charisma and charm and sex appeal, but they read them.

Nicky smiled, guileless, and felt his power spark at the returned grin, sweet and genuine, the warmth in blue-grey eyes half hidden behind too-long dark hair.

They danced together, too close for anything platonic. Nicky kept half an eye out for trouble—this wasn’t a Safe Zone, he wouldn’t have needed to be here if it had been—but aside from some sideways looks they went unmolested, and every second, every heart-pounding moment of it trickled power into Nicky’s reserves. The trickle became a torrent as hands found hips, shyly, and Nicky forced himself not to grow giddy with it, with the rush of strength that always came with reaffirming himself.

And there was a soft sweetness underneath it, one that made him feel fond and warm. He put that into the kiss, at the end of their fourth song together, gentle and nearly chaste, a thank you and a regret that he couldn’t stay.

No words, and certainly no phone numbers. But when he slipped back into the crowd, his aura was bright and strong with power, power raised through nothing but love-of-life (which was really the ability to love yourself) and he left his dancing partner smiling.

The rest of the night wouldn’t be so sweet, and he drew his aura in tight, shielding its light so as not to give himself away. Because the thing he hunted could See just as well as he could, and if Nicky wasn’t very careful, he might end up on the wrong side of the equation before the night was through.

*

“Who was _that?”_

Ethan dragged his eyes away from the guy’s retreating back with a pang of longing, and glanced at his best friend/sister. “Where the hell have you been?”

Mercedes, sucking a can of soda through a red straw, waved another can at him. “It was hot in here, so I got us drinks.” She looked appreciatively after the vanishing dancer. “Of course, if I’d known _how_ hot it could get...”

Ethan hoped the strobe lights hid the flush in his cheeks. “He was nobody. Don’t make a big deal about it.” He reached for the other can, but she danced lightly away from him.

“Uh uh. Not until you go get his number.”

Ethan hesitated, and Mercedes grinned, all pearly teeth against golden olive skin. “See? You know you want to.” She closed her lips around the straw again, smug. “Go get him, tiger.”

“Only if you swear to never say that again,” Ethan parried, but he glanced back in the direction the blue-haired guy had vanished in, his stomach a mess of electric knots, excitement touching fingertips with dread.

Mercedes rolled her eyes. “Fine. _I’ll_ go.”

Ethan whipped his head around, aghast. “What? No! Merc—wait—!” But she was already breezing past him, carelessly pushing the second can of soda into his hands before disappearing into the crowd.

“Why do you do this to me?” Ethan asked the ceiling piteously, pushing through dancing men and women while trying to keep his wayward foster sister in sight. “I’m a good person, aren’t I? I even help little old ladies cross the street. What did I do to deserve a sister who micro-manages my love life?”

Not that there was much of a love life to manage. Which was kind of Mercedes’ point. But the thought of Merc demanding the guy’s phone number ‘for my friend over there’ (or worse, ‘my _brother’_ ) was so cringingly horrible that he wasn’t inclined to be generous to her well-meaning intentions.

He caught up with her at the edge of the crowd. “Okay, look, I’ll go talk to him if you promise to stay out of it.” The nervous embarrassment of actually talking to a hot guy—even one who had approached him first—was severely outclassed by the proposed humiliation of Mercedes doing it for him. “Will that do?”

“Too late,” Merc sighed. “Look.”

She pointed, and Ethan turned. It took him a moment, but then he caught sight of neon-blue hair, standing up above the young man’s skull like the crest of some mythical creature. Instantly baby pterodactyls hatched in his gut and began to make their presence known.

“Right.” He took a deep breath. “I’ll just—”

He stopped. Crushing disappointment dropped into his stomach like a stone, because he saw what Merc had meant. Blue Hair was locked, laser-like, on another young man, a blond who had stopped dancing to look back at Blue.

The intent, hunting-dog expression on Blue’s face—the intensity between the two men, even through the crowd—no. Ethan didn’t have a chance of regaining Blue’s attention.

“That’s that then,” he said lightly. The pterodactyls died under the falling rocks, one by one.

Mercedes sighed again and laced her arm through his. “Maybe next time.” She leaned her head on his shoulder. “It’s getting late. Maybe it would be best if we just headed home—”

“Hang on a sec.”

“What?”

He wasn’t looking at her, but he felt her stiffen next to him as she spotted what he had. Two men in dark clothes were making their way towards Blue, slipping through the crowd like sharks through a shoal. Blue, entirely focussed on the blond, didn’t notice—especially now that the blond was backing away from him, looking around as if searching for a way out.

“What the hell?” Merc whispered.

“I—shit!”

The pair of hunters—that was how Ethan instinctively thought of them—lunged. They caught Blue’s arms and quickly, before he could make a sound, one of them smashed a fist into the side of his head. He went limp in an instant, hanging like a doll in their grip.

And no one noticed. The multi-coloured dancers in their denim and latex kept on grinding and laughing and flirting, blind to the young man being attacked in their midst. When the blond, now relaxed, joined them the pair began carrying Blue away—the crowd parted for them automatically, but blindly, without realising why they moved.

Mercedes recovered first. “Get your phone out!” she ordered. “Start dialling for the cops.” Without waiting for his answer she ran after the men.

“Merc! Damn it!” Scrambling for his phone, Ethan chased after her, the nausea of adrenalin twisting through him, sick and cold. His mind was spinning but it didn’t occur to him not to follow, even as the club’s lights started strobing. Light and dark and light again, in dizzying, jump-starting flashes that turned Mercedes into a ghost, turned everything into a stop-motion film, and if Merc or anyone else was shouting Ethan couldn’t hear it over the pounding bass.

He saw the fire door open and didn’t stop to wonder why the building’s alarms hadn’t gone off. The men went through it, and Mercedes paused, hesitated for the bare instant Ethan needed to catch up with her. With only a glance at each other to discuss it, they went through the door after Blue and his captors.

The exit opened onto the smotheringly hot summer night in an alleyway, probably where trucks unloaded the club’s deliveries. For a minute all Ethan could make out in the dim light were trash cans and graffiti, but then Merc hissed and pointed.

They both hesitated. In the deepest, darkest part of the alley, barely touched by the light from above the fire door, was Blue, still hanging between his new friends. If you didn’t know what was going on, Ethan thought, you could have believed they _were_ his friends, escorting him home after too wild a night. But the air around them was thick with menace, and there was the blond guy who’d played bait standing by them. And another figure, one Ethan couldn’t quite make out.

He swallowed hard. “Hey!” he shouted, moving down the cement steps. He brandished his phone. “I’m calling the cops right now. If you run for it maybe you won’t get done for assault!”

“I think there’s been a misunderstanding.” A smooth, female voice came out of the darkness like a black velvet ribbon. The last figure, the one Ethan hadn’t been able to quite see, stepped forward and into the light: a young blonde woman around Ethan and Merc’s age. She had a warm, sheepish smile, which she used, spreading her hands as if to say _oops! Isn’t this silly?_ “Our friend’s had a bit too much to drink. We’re just making sure he gets home all right.”

“Bullshit,” Merc snapped.

“I saw you hit him,” Ethan agreed, standing his ground despite the flutter in his throat. “Seriously. Let him go and _fuck off.”_

The slightly embarrassed sweetness vanished from the girl’s face like marker wiped from a whiteboard. “I don’t think so, sweetie. Go play Boy Wonder somewhere else. We’re a little out of your league.”

Ethan pressed the call button and lifted his mobile to his ear. It felt as though each of his organs were shivering, his fear shaking him up inside like a snowglobe, but he refused to look away from the young woman as he heard a click.

_“911, what is your emergency?”_

“I want to report an assault in progress—”

The alleyway exploded. Purple light drove the darkness away screaming, and then the world spun, the ground dropped away and Mercedes was shouting. Ethan’s phone slipped from his fingers— _“Sir? Sir, are you all right? Sir?”_ —and he was in the air, bruise-violet serpents holding him ten, fifteen feet off the ground by his throat and he couldn’t breathe, scraped at his neck and kicked and couldn’t _breathe_ —

“Ethan!” Mercedes screamed. “You _bitch_ , put him down!”

“Of course,” the blonde girl purred. She snapped her wrist and _hurled_ him, threw him like a tennis ball out of the alley and into the street and Ethan heard a car horn and screeching tires and then nothing at all.

 


End file.
